The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  Maddeningly, the fights were hard to find. Soldiers waited for days, listening to their radios crackle with rumours and reports of skirmishes. They lolled in the shade of their troop carriers, dazed by the heat and deprived of sleep by their regular shifts to keep watch. They rigged up sound systems inside the armoured shell of their vehicles and hip-hop echoed over the emptiness. Others passed the time watching DVDs, or clipping photos of women from magazines. Their vehicles offered more than protection from bullets, more than powerful weapons; they were life itself, a source of food and electricity and comfort. Soldiers did not even call them vehicles; instead, they were “boats,” sailing through desolation. Inside the metal armour was civilization. Outside was terror.

  In the end, the operation settled into a search of recently abandoned Taliban bases. The soldiers’ trophies were mostly junk: flares, tripwires, ammunition holders, bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, timing devices, gun parts and a mobile phone rewired to serve as a remote trigger for explosives. Most of the insurgents seemed to have been living in Afghan homes, but some excavated tunnels in the hard-baked earth. One of these fortifications started as a trench in a streambed and curved away into a small entrance. I ducked low and scrambled inside on my hands and knees, waiting for a moment inside to adjust to the cool darkness. The trench continued underground, covered by layers of sticks and corrugated metal sheeting, buried under layers of dirt. I groped my way through the tunnel’s zigzags, holding out my cellphone to cast light on the rough walls. Eventually the crawlspace opened up into a cavern, lit by shafts of light from chinks in the mud. The floor was covered with garbage, including the sort of water bottles imported to Afghanistan by the international troops. Some of the empty wrappers also suggested that the insurgents had been eating packaged food distributed by well-meaning foreigners. A soldier shouted down, asking what I’d found in the Taliban tunnels.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Dead end.”

  Canadian soldier rests during Operation Medusa

  CHAPTER 5

  MEDUSA’S AFTERMATH SEPTEMBER 2006

  “The war’s over, dude.” That was my wildly incorrect assessment in an e-mail to a friend on September 12, as international forces settled into their freshly conquered swath of farmland in the Panjwai valley. Operation Medusa had been a defining moment for NATO, the largest battle Afghanistan had witnessed since the fall of the Taliban regime. It wasn’t officially finished, but it was cooling down. I caught a ride on a supply convoy to a small outpost, where one officer compared the happy atmosphere to that of a classroom near the end of a school year. That evening, I sat with Canada’s battle group commander and watched the sun setting over the valley from the same rooftop where I had witnessed a hail of air strikes several days earlier. Leaning back in his metal folding chair, Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie expressed pride that the combined NATO forces had successfully beaten a major gathering of insurgents. But he still seemed taken aback that so many Taliban had surfaced in the first place. He looked tired.

  “After fighting one of the biggest engagements we’ve seen here in the last four or five years,” he said, “I’ll be honest, the numbers that came at us surprised me. I’d say their tenacity surprised me as well.” The commander tried to explain the Taliban resurgence as a sign of their desperation: as thousands of NATO troops arrived in the south, the insurgents were forced to choose between retreating or attacking, he said. “They’re caught between a rock and a hard place.” That’s how the military leadership viewed their opponents at the time, as hapless mercenaries who were bullied into throwing themselves into the fight, believing they would face punishment from ringleaders in Pakistan if they didn’t sacrifice themselves on the battlefield. At the same time, the military also appeared to think the Taliban had global ambitions, and the reach necessary to export terrorism around the world: “I don’t look at this purely from the perspective that I’m here to help the Afghans fight an enemy,” the colonel said. “Because, yeah, clearly the Taliban are the enemy of the Afghan people. But on a much broader scale, they’re also the enemy of most democratic countries and the Western world.”

  I respected this commander, but his views didn’t make sense. It seemed unlikely that villagers in the Panjwai valley would allow their homes to be used as Taliban outposts entirely against their will; in a place where farmers often stashed automatic weapons in their houses for self-defence, I couldn’t believe that the locals would be easily intimidated into co-operating. (They were not so easily persuaded to help the NATO forces, for example.) How could the Taliban multiply so astonishingly? And, more broadly, was NATO really fighting—as advertised—the enemies of the Western world, or just a bunch of rebellious farmers? As soon as I’d returned from the battlefield, had a shower and a cheeseburger and a full night of sleep in an air-conditioned tent, I left my body armour in a heap on the floor of the media tent. I changed into more comfortable clothing, and went in search of answers.

  In the meantime, Western politicians and military leaders were busy claiming victory. “The Taliban is on the run,” proclaimed Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in a nationally televised address, in which he surrounded himself with families of victims from the 9/11 attacks. US Marine general James Jones, then serving as NATO’s most senior commander, told a Senate committee that the Taliban had given international forces a difficult test, and “they passed brilliantly and successfully.” In a speech on September 29, President George W. Bush elaborated on the same message, and gave his own summary of Operation Medusa:

  We saw the effectiveness of NATO forces this summer, when NATO took responsibility from the United States for security operations in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban saw the transfer of the region from the United States to NATO control as a window of opportunity. They saw it as an opportunity to test the will of nations other than the United States. See, they’ve been testing our will. And they understand it’s strong, and they need to understand it will remain strong.

  President Bush waited for applause from his audience, a group of reserve officers, and continued:

  So the Taliban massed an estimated eight hundred to nine hundred fighters near Kandahar to face the NATO force head-on. And that was a mistake. Earlier this month, NATO launched Operation Medusa. Together with the Afghan National Army, troops from Canada, and Denmark, and the Netherlands, and Britain, and the United States engaged the enemy, with operational support from Romanian, and Portuguese, and Estonian forces. According to NATO commanders, NATO forces killed hundreds of Taliban fighters.… The operation also sent a clear message to the Afghan people: that NATO is standing with you.

  The number of Taliban killed in the operation seemed to climb higher as the triumphant speeches continued. Some military officials bragged that US Spectre gunships had hunted fleeing Taliban into the desert and slaughtered them by the hundreds. The lumbering warplanes killed so many insurgents that they ran short of ammunition, the officers said, speaking in awed tones about how the Spectre’s smoky flares make the aircraft look like a shining angel of death. Some officials claimed that fifteen hundred or more insurgents died in the operation, prompting breathless media reports that the battle killed off a major portion of the estimated three to four thousand committed fighters in the entire country. I told my boss to remain skeptical about these claims: “For anybody to suggest anything about a certain number of Taliban killed as ‘a large chunk of the entire force’ tells me that person knows absolutely nothing about this battlefield,” I wrote in an e-mail to the newsroom. “The Taliban are a movement, not a discrete number of fighters.”

  Kandahar’s politicians also declared victory. On September 17, Governor Asadullah Khalid summoned journalists to his palace garden, an oasis of manicured grass and rose bushes hidden behind high walls in the heart of the city. “The enemy has been completely eliminated,” Mr. Khalid announced. The governor had made his entrance through a trellised archway covered with flowers, flanked by senior Afghan security commanders and NATO’s Brigadier-General
Fraser. It was all very picturesque, if you ignored the fact that a suicide bomber had rammed a minivan full of explosives into a NATO convoy earlier that morning, suggesting that the Taliban had not, in fact, vanished. All the same, the government’s supporters in Kandahar seemed satisfied. The Taliban were no longer camped on the outskirts of their urban enclave, and the threat of major battles in the city streets had faded. The fighting season was coming to an end as autumn approached, and cold rain turned the former battlefields into rivers of mud that literally stopped insurgents in their tracks.

  I picked my way through the muddy streets one afternoon, and went to see Haji Mohammed Qassam, a provincial council member. The politician represented a branch of the Barakzai tribe, a group that generally aligned itself with the foreign troops in Kandahar. He lived in a compound on the south side of the city, at the end of a narrow alley. A teenager with a Kalashnikov guarded the mouth of the alley, but he smiled when he recognized me from previous visits. Inside, Mr. Qassam was hosting a group of bearded elders. I slipped out of my sandals at the doorway and gave the ritual greetings as I stepped onto the carpet: Salam aleikum, tsanga ye? Peace be upon you, how are you? I only understood a few of the words; the rest was a stream of syllables repeated from memory, part of an elaborate dance required to enter a room politely. I shook hands with every man in the circle before Mr. Qassam waved to a seat beside him on a red velveteen cushion. Sitting cross-legged, I made eye contact with each man in the room and repeated the greetings. I’ve always appreciated the gentility of these customs; it also gives you plenty of time to assess your companions and decide if they’re dangerous. I was grateful to Mr. Qassam for inviting me to sit beside him, because if a busy man banishes you to a low-prestige seat near the doorway you may find yourself waiting for hours as he finishes his business.

  Mr. Qassam switched from his own language to a rapid-fire patter of barely intelligible English, hard for me to understand and impossible for the others in the room. “Most people are happy about this fighting,” he said. If the Taliban weren’t stopped in Panjwai, he said, they would have spilled over into the neighbouring district of Dand, where his own farms were located. He seemed to recognize that his opinion might appear self-serving. “But we have some people in Kandahar with sympathy for the Taliban,” he acknowledged, “and they did not like this fight.” Either way, nobody thought the fighting in the Panjwai valley was finished, he said. Tens of thousands of local residents who fled their homes now refused to go back, despite NATO’s promise to rebuild their villages.

  The politician paused for breath, and I slipped in the two questions that were preoccupying me: Why so many Taliban? And, are they really international terrorists, or disgruntled locals? Mr. Qassam started with the second question, saying that some of the insurgents did arrive from religious schools in Pakistan, so in that sense they were operating internationally—but everybody in the south views the Pakistan border as an illegitimate line dividing the Pashtun people, so nobody would see the Taliban as foreigners. The only group of insurgents from far-flung places were probably the members of Hizb-i-Islami, a militia that operates semi-independently in eastern Afghanistan. But those were a tiny minority of the fighters, he said; the heart of the problem was that villagers rebelled against the government. This caught my attention, because it reminded me of Lieutenant Edwards, the US officer who had described the rebellious villagers in Zabul. But why would any villager reject a government that is bringing an avalanche of foreign aid? Mr. Qassam himself was involved with distributing the riches, spending hours sitting with planners who dished out money for bridges, schools and irrigation projects. The politician poked buttons on a few cellphones, stalling for a moment. Finally he said, “We make big mistakes.”

  He offered several examples of blunders in the months before Operation Medusa, but one event stood out as the biggest: in the summer of 2006, the Afghan government sent a commander named Abdul Razik to stop the Taliban from gaining strength in the Panjwai valley. Mr. Razik had official status as a commander of the Afghan Border Police in a district near the Pakistani border, and sometimes described himself as a “Colonel Razik” (or, later, “General Razik”), but in those days his force resembled an informal militia drawn from members of the Achakzai tribe. Unfortunately, the Achakzai had been feuding for centuries with another major tribe that inhabits the borderland, the Noorzai. The Noorzai are also populous in the river valley southwest of Kandahar city, so when the government dispatched Mr. Razik there in August, the locals did not view the action as an exercise of authority by the central government; instead, they saw an incursion by their tribal enemy. Rumours spread through the valley that the police commander intended to kill not only Taliban but any member of the Noorzai tribe. The issue must have been further confused by the fact that the Panjwai valley was among the Taliban’s first strongholds during their sweep to power in 1994, which came with help from powerful backers among the Noorzai. Any campaign to kill off people with Taliban links must have been viewed by the locals as indiscriminate slaughter, because of the sheer density of people with such connections in the area. In any case, Mr. Razik’s band of men soon found themselves facing an armed uprising. Locals ambushed them southwest of the district’s biggest town, forcing Mr. Razik to retreat, with the bodies of policemen abandoned to rot in the middle of the road. Humiliatingly, the government had to negotiate with local tribesmen for permission to give the officers a proper burial. “This was a bad idea, to bring Abdul Razik,” Mr. Qassam said. “One village had ten or twenty fighters against the government before he came—and the next day, maybe two hundred.”

  I wanted to meet some of those angry Noorzai tribesmen. One of my translators was a member of the Noorzai himself, but that actually made the task more difficult. Only a few members of his family were aware that he worked for the foreign media, and it would have been dangerous to be branded as a collaborator with the infidels. Our interview subjects were also nervous about being observed talking with a foreigner, which made our encounters clandestine. We found one subject squatting at an arranged location in an alleyway, and he led us around the back of his house so he could usher me into his guest room without being noticed. A middle-aged man with a bushy beard, he settled into the cushions while his son poured water from a steel pitcher to wash his father’s hands, then ours. He had returned the previous day from the Panjwai valley, where he owned a large farm. His grape vines were dying, he said, because the diesel generator that ran his water pump had broken and no repairman wanted to risk the trip. Insurgents had mined the road to his homestead. One of his field hands had recently noticed two wires sticking out of the dirt; innocently fiddling with the unusual objects, he touched the wires together—and was knocked flat on his back by an explosion as a nearby bridge disappeared in a shower of rubble. “The Taliban were angry with him,” the farmer said, chuckling. “He wasted an expensive mine.” Still, the insurgents did not punish the worker for ruining their booby trap. The Taliban appeared to be wooing the locals with careful behaviour, forbidding their fighters from looting homes or robbing travellers. “When they came to my farm, they did not eat my grapes without permission,” the farmer said approvingly. Not that the Taliban presence meant no risks. He pulled a black leather diary from his breast pocket and showed me where he had scribbled a few phone numbers for government officials. Those numbers could have gotten him killed if the Taliban had found the diary during their regular searches at checkpoints, because the fighters would have assumed he was working with the government. Still, he considered the Afghan police far more predatory. Like other local people, he never used the Pashto word for “police” when discussing law enforcement: instead, he described the security forces as topakan, which translates loosely as “gun lord” or warlord. He spit the word like an epithet. The topakan had originally been proud mujahedeen, holy warriors who expelled the Soviet forces, but they fell upon each other in a frenzy of civil war from 1992 to 1994, a period of internecine warfare that became the dark
est days anybody could remember. Rebels who had defended the country turned into petty marauders—topakan—squabbling with each other for territory. For local police to be tarred with the label topakan meant they had become the worst sort of brigands in the eyes of the people. These grievances were exploited by the Taliban, who had presented themselves as a way of removing the topakan during the establishment of their original regime in 1994. (Taliban is the plural form of talib, or student, and the movement has always drawn support from the idea of virtue associated with religious study.) Although wealthy, the landowner I was interviewing dressed shabbily for the sake of paying smaller bribes at checkpoints. His clothes were stained and dirty, his cheap wristwatch losing its gold patina. “You know why the Taliban are increasing day by day?” he said. “The local forces beat people and steal their money.”

  I heard similar stories in the days after Operation Medusa, as I tried to puzzle through how the battle started. Villagers described police stealing from shops, ransacking storehouses and seizing caches of opium that would never be reported. Some committed arson to cover up their looting and blamed the insurgents for the fires. Shakedowns cost the locals their wristwatches, cellphones, even their vehicles. The police confiscated so many motorcycles that one young man took a novel approach to avoiding the problem. Driving up to a checkpoint one summer evening, he yanked the keys from the ignition of his motorcycle and threw them into the bushes. He rolled gently to a stop at the police roadblock and parked his bike. The officers demanded his keys, but he explained that he’d tossed them away. “They beat him, took his money and his watch. But he kept his bike,” said the young man’s friend, laughing. It was unclear how the youth later managed to collect his bike, but the stunt turned him into a local hero for outwitting the cops.